Coates: The new racial divide

Tuesday

Aug 28, 2012 at 12:01 AMAug 28, 2012 at 3:59 AM

A few weeks ago, a commenter on my blog at The Atlantic tried to describe the peculiar conundrum he’d found himself in as he tried to enroll his daughter in school. He was African-American and upwardly mobile. But he was very interested in maintaining ties with his community. Historically, African-Americans have maintained intense ties with each other across class lines.

By Ta-Nehisi Coates/Guest Columnist

A few weeks ago, a commenter on my blog at The Atlantic tried to describe the peculiar conundrum he’d found himself in as he tried to enroll his daughter in school. He was African-American and upwardly mobile. But he was very interested in maintaining ties with his community. Historically, African-Americans have maintained intense ties with each other across class lines.

One of the quirky advantages to segregation (if one may speak of such things) was that it imposed a kind of equality on black people. A black neighborhood might be home to families struggling with poverty, others with secure working-class jobs, and still others headed by doctors or lawyers. But with the end of segregation and the onset of freedom, black people have been relatively free to follow their interests. Public school, however, still allowed children to be exposed to black people of all backgrounds and thus have some idea of the wide variance within their community and within the human family at large.

The commenter wanted to send his kid to a public school to give her that broad vision of humanity’s possibilities. But she found that virtually all the schools were in crisis mode, obsessed with keeping young black boys and girls from becoming statistics. As I’ve written about before, this is an entirely reasonable approach given the socioeconomic statistical profile of the black community. But if, as an individual, you live outside those numbers, they tend to bear less and less relation. The commenter wasn’t worried about his daughter becoming a statistic. He was worried about her being able to compete out in the fields of the world that had eluded him. He was black and proud, but he struggled with a blackness defined strictly as being “at risk.”

I read the comment with a curious mix of recognition and resentment. Trying to bridge the fissure between who you feel yourself to be, and who you are becoming is familiar to me as well as many African-Americans. It is the feeling of being black, reveling in black culture, being rooted in the history, but worrying that somehow The Struggle has passed you by. The Struggle in our parents’ years was to live in a world in which something as arbitrary as skin color defined their limitations. The Struggle was against actual words inscribed in the law books of this country. When I came of age, those laws were gone. But The Struggle meant grappling with their legacy - coming out on the southern end of virtually any relevant life statistic.

What I feel now is not so much an absence of The Struggle, but a distance from the physical dangers and fears which I once took as central to it. This is a good thing. It’s exactly what generations of African-Americans have fought to achieve. My parents’ great fears for me revolved around prisons, open-air drug markets and Saturday-night specials. I don’t worry about those things for my son, at least not to the same degree - though even as I finish this sentence I feel some amount of blasphemy. Fear of the perils of the greater American world helped bind black people into a nation. What happens to us in a world without such fears?

I have gotten something of a glimpse. A few years ago my wife went back to college. We moved into a bustling college community. There were nice bars and restaurants, a 24-hour grocery store, farmers’ markets, and charming cafes. It was not an entirely white area, but it was the first place I’d ever lived that I could safely classify as a “non-hood.” The first thing I noticed was the absence of the air of violence, the way it worms into people and shapes greetings and manners. In my old neighborhood I had broken up fights between kids. But I saw none of that here.

All of this is an obvious plus, but it was only after we’d moved that I realized how much living in the air of violence had been a kind of social glue. It shaped my stories from childhood and bonded me with friends who’d grown up in entirely different cities but under the same social structure.

It would be too much to say I feel less “black.” My accent and vocabulary is still the same. I still feel powerfully rooted in my history and heritage. But what is now happening is a class of African-Americans is maturing in a world very different from that of their grandparents, and an entirely different class is still struggling with the legacy and problems of that old world. I look at the growing chasm with great wonder and greater concern.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a writer and senior editor for The Atlantic and its website. His blog can be found at www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates.

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